It was home to the army of colonial bureaucrats who ran India, so it was perhaps inevitable that the original 18th-century plans for Kolkata’s Writers’ Building would be found buried under reams of paperwork.

“We even wrote to the British Library in the hope that some of the drawings might have been preserved there,” says architect Madhumita Roy as she talks through some of the problems her team has faced trying to restore one of India’s most iconic buildings to its original glory.

“They were able to provide photographs of the building’s facade from the early 1880s but they said that copies of the original plan were not available,” she told AFP.

“And when we had almost given up hope, these three drawings surfaced in our public works department under volumes of drawing plans for various other buildings in the city.”

The discovery was a rare piece of good news in a project that is more than a year behind schedule and has drawn widespread criticism in the eastern metropolis of Kolkata.

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“We have decided to keep the main building and all the five blocks intact since they are part of the heritage structure, but we will raze all the other eight blocks which have been built in the post-independence era,” explained Roy during a tour of the renovation work.

When notices were posted last month stating “this block/building will be demolished”, there was an immediate backlash.

Anger intensified when bulldozers began reducing part of the structure to rubble, a move campaigners say lacked approval from the city’s conservation watchdog.

“Writers’ is listed with the civic body as a Grade I heritage structure,” said Subrata Sil, director of the city’s Heritage Conservation Committee.